6 ms·

The title is off. This is a wife-selection algorithm. If anybody has real ideas for optimizing a wife, please post. Also, if you do apply this method, don't

The title is off. This is a wife-selection algorithm. If anybody has real ideas for optimizing a wife, please post. Also, if you do apply this method, don't tell your perspective wife. She will drop you like a rock.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
ableal 17y ago
> If anybody has real ideas for optimizing a wife, please post. "Rub her feet." (http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html)
Dove 17y ago
The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. Overlap due to some correlations and the fact that it's easier to screw things up than get things right. To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion.
- alttab 17y ago
  I upvoted you but would also like to say that this comment is severely under-rated. It is very obvious to me that you know what you are talking about.
- mtw 17y ago
  "The quality of your wife is ... 20% who you choose" doesn't make sense to me. Or does that imply that if you sacrifice for noble goals and be a man of character, you'll automatically meet a good quality wife?
  - Dove 17y ago
    You will necessarily meet a number of quality women in your life. Which of them you choose to pursue has some effect on the quality of your wife, but it has a much smaller effect than how you treat her.
    - mtw 17y ago
      I understand what you mean but I think presenting it as 20% is misleading imho. One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice. Because with your figures (40 and 80%), you could still "optimize" the person later, in theory.
      - lotharbot 17y ago
        "One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice." It's more like, as long as you're looking at quality women (that is, you've constrained yourself to all pretty good choices), it doesn't matter very much which specific one you pick. Some people have a mental model of marriage (much like the one in the original article) in which 99.9% of the effort and return come from picking the exact right person, at which point everything just falls into place. This model is wrong and indeed harmful, as it implies the other person makes the marriage work automatically. Instead, we say, put in a small amount of effort to make sure you're looking at a set of quality women (so don't pick up Trampy McSkanksalot at the club.) But as long as you're looking at quality women, don't worry too much about getting the exact right one; the more important optimization is how you behave yourself and how you treat her. Only a small percentage of your effort should go into the picking process; most of it should go into making sure you're a quality person and you treat whoever you mutually pick with love and respect and all those other things. I have a fantastic marriage (to the poster you're responding to). My dad and my father-in-law, who are both very much like me, also have fantastic marriages. Our wives are all very different from each other, but they are all quality women, and we all treat them in the ways Dove originally described. If you swapped our wives' personalities, we'd all still have quality marriages for exactly those same reasons.
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. This is incredibly idealistic - and doesn't really jive with the real world. It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality. And this is false! I mean, there's so many real world examples - some people are undisciplined, unambitious, self-centered, reckless, not grounded, etc, etc. Unfortunately, I know a couple guys, good guys overall, who married such women. No matter how much he toils in the marriage, it can't and won't be a good marriage. The character and quality of your spouse has a lot to do with their character - you can help them grow to some extent, but you need to start from a good place. The idea that "be a good person and conduct yourself well and things will work out" sounds nice, but is in fact dangerous and bad advice. For both men and women, the base character of your spouse matters a lot - and that's before even starting to look at compatibility and having complimentary views. Idealism - "be a good man and things will work out" - sounds nice, but it's the sort of thing you need to be careful with.
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    "It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality." No; you've misinterpreted Dove's point[1]. Let me clarify: The amount of effort it takes to ensure that one marries a "quality" person is very small compared to the amount of effort the other stuff takes. One does not need to pick the very most perfect woman in order to have a great marriage, only to pick a woman within the set of "quality women". Put in the 20% effort to restrict your search to quality women. To optimize further, focus the rest of your efforts on being a quality person yourself and on treating your wife well, instead of focusing on finding "the best" of the quality women. It is dangerous advice to ignore the character of your spouse. Pick someone of good character. But honestly, that's easy in comparison to living a life of integrity and treating your wife appropriately. [1] as Dove's husband, I have additional insight into her intended meaning.
  - Dove 17y ago
    Fair. Of course, the whole thing is a simplistic rhetorical device; real life is complicated. If you really could expect full marks in "be a man of character" and "treat her right" categories -- if you were some mythical combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, perhaps you could redeem a fairly self-centered wife. Those are, after all, men who made their names by succeeding at redeeming evil cultures with little more than compassion and force of character. But it'd sure be difficult and painful. I'm not claiming things would "work out" easily even in the best case, and that's the worst one. Most folks really can't expect straight A's there. Most folks, if they're honest with themselves, are shooting for more like a C+ and maybe don't even always get there. So in a way, how my model handles that corner case is academic. My point by assigning such a low value to who you choose isn't that it doesn't matter at all -- of course it does. Of course you can easily doom the whole thing to failure (short of heroic measures) by marrying an utterly irredeemable jerk. My point is that it's not a relatively big contributer. And I'm strongly of the opinion that it isn't. Stick to quality women, or even just decent women, and the other factors dominate. Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance. That's why the quality of your wife is 120% you. You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or sink to low ones. Do you want your wife to be beautiful at 35? It doesn't matter whether she was a 6 or 10 or 8 at 24 when you married her. It matters whether you've been buying her jewelry, telling her her beauty is worth sacrifice and expense to you. It matters whether you've been telling her she's beautiful, encouraging her to experiment with new shoes, or making fun of her when you find her with green goop all over her face. It matters whether you criticize or support, because her outward appearance is a measure of her self-esteem, her confidence, and whether she thinks being pretty is a hobby worth keeping up with. Do you want a sexually engaged wife? Make sex something she loves. Be generous. Be romantic. Be attentive. And wait five years. Do you want a kind and generous wife? Be kind and generous. Do you want a wife who understands you? Talk to her. Do you want a wife who is not annoyed with you all the time? Listen to her criticism, don't defend yourself, change your behavior, explain in tenderest and most loving tones what has been misunderstood. To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her. (Goes the other way, too. But this place is mostly guys).
- patrickgzill 17y ago
  May I ask if you are actually married?
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    Dove and I are married to each other.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      There should be some logic in HN to stop you two from down-voting each other for unrelated reasons. I would hate to see you lose 50 points for not taking the garbage out.
      - Dove 17y ago
        We post (and vote) from the same IP address a lot. On my honor, for independent reasons. But I think the code edits it out sometimes anyway. Oh well. I hate sock puppets as much as the next person, and my identity isn't that tied up in my HN karma score...
  - Dove 17y ago
    To lotharbot. Almost eight years. He does this stuff right most of the time, and I'm a good wife most of the time. That's how I know what works.
- rossover 17y ago
  Math fail
Groxx 17y ago
Simple method for optimizing a marriage, as it works from both ends: Love does not merely happen, and merely continue. It takes work. Put effort into loving more and being more lovable (ie, self improvement), and your relationship will improve. I see too many long-married couples who are mostly together out of convenience / habit / apathy, and it really shows in their relationship and their lives in general. The ones I've found who are really happy have wonderful married lives because they both worked at it, and continue to do so, and this sample set includes a couple dozen 10-year-somethings through 50-year-somethings and a couple older yet. I've only been married for a few months, though we've been living together and effectively married for over two years, so go ahead and chock it up to n00b idealism. But why does that have to end? I've found plenty of cases where it never did, and every one of them has said it's because they worked to keep it going, and they're all vibrant, happy people.
pageman 17y ago
is this algorithm related to this? www.virginia.edu/economics/RePEc/vir/virpap/papers/virpap359.pdf
duck 17y ago
I think both optimizing and wife-selection are best left to another four letter word that isn't 'math', but rather love. I don't think love can be computed nor would it make sense to even try.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

ableal 17y ago

> If anybody has real ideas for optimizing a wife, please post. "Rub her feet." (http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html http://www.angelfire.com/or/sociologyshop/lazlong.html)

Dove 17y ago

The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. Overlap due to some correlations and the fact that it's easier to screw things up than get things right. To pre-optimize a future wife, focus on being a man of character. Sacrifice for noble goals, exercise self-discipline, show love to family, especially your mother. To optimize an existing wife, continue to do those things, and also spend a lot of time together, be romantic, communicate honestly and frequently (pursue intimacy; resolve to hold no secrets), and ensure a good sex life for her--which for you means generosity and an eye toward emotion.

alttab 17y ago
I upvoted you but would also like to say that this comment is severely under-rated. It is very obvious to me that you know what you are talking about.
mtw 17y ago
"The quality of your wife is ... 20% who you choose" doesn't make sense to me. Or does that imply that if you sacrifice for noble goals and be a man of character, you'll automatically meet a good quality wife?
- Dove 17y ago
  You will necessarily meet a number of quality women in your life. Which of them you choose to pursue has some effect on the quality of your wife, but it has a much smaller effect than how you treat her.
  - mtw 17y ago
    I understand what you mean but I think presenting it as 20% is misleading imho. One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice. Because with your figures (40 and 80%), you could still "optimize" the person later, in theory.
    - lotharbot 17y ago
      "One might conclude that it's doesn't matter if you choose a nice, good-looking, smart etc. person vs another poor choice." It's more like, as long as you're looking at quality women (that is, you've constrained yourself to all pretty good choices), it doesn't matter very much which specific one you pick. Some people have a mental model of marriage (much like the one in the original article) in which 99.9% of the effort and return come from picking the exact right person, at which point everything just falls into place. This model is wrong and indeed harmful, as it implies the other person makes the marriage work automatically. Instead, we say, put in a small amount of effort to make sure you're looking at a set of quality women (so don't pick up Trampy McSkanksalot at the club.) But as long as you're looking at quality women, don't worry too much about getting the exact right one; the more important optimization is how you behave yourself and how you treat her. Only a small percentage of your effort should go into the picking process; most of it should go into making sure you're a quality person and you treat whoever you mutually pick with love and respect and all those other things. I have a fantastic marriage (to the poster you're responding to). My dad and my father-in-law, who are both very much like me, also have fantastic marriages. Our wives are all very different from each other, but they are all quality women, and we all treat them in the ways Dove originally described. If you swapped our wives' personalities, we'd all still have quality marriages for exactly those same reasons.
lionhearted 17y ago
> The quality of your wife is 40% who you are, 20% who you choose, and 80% how you conduct yourself during courtship and marriage. This is incredibly idealistic - and doesn't really jive with the real world. It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality. And this is false! I mean, there's so many real world examples - some people are undisciplined, unambitious, self-centered, reckless, not grounded, etc, etc. Unfortunately, I know a couple guys, good guys overall, who married such women. No matter how much he toils in the marriage, it can't and won't be a good marriage. The character and quality of your spouse has a lot to do with their character - you can help them grow to some extent, but you need to start from a good place. The idea that "be a good person and conduct yourself well and things will work out" sounds nice, but is in fact dangerous and bad advice. For both men and women, the base character of your spouse matters a lot - and that's before even starting to look at compatibility and having complimentary views. Idealism - "be a good man and things will work out" - sounds nice, but it's the sort of thing you need to be careful with.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  "It says if a man is a good man and conducts himself exceptionally during courtship and marriage, his wife is almost certain to be quality." No; you've misinterpreted Dove's point[1]. Let me clarify: The amount of effort it takes to ensure that one marries a "quality" person is very small compared to the amount of effort the other stuff takes. One does not need to pick the very most perfect woman in order to have a great marriage, only to pick a woman within the set of "quality women". Put in the 20% effort to restrict your search to quality women. To optimize further, focus the rest of your efforts on being a quality person yourself and on treating your wife well, instead of focusing on finding "the best" of the quality women. It is dangerous advice to ignore the character of your spouse. Pick someone of good character. But honestly, that's easy in comparison to living a life of integrity and treating your wife appropriately. [1] as Dove's husband, I have additional insight into her intended meaning.
- Dove 17y ago
  Fair. Of course, the whole thing is a simplistic rhetorical device; real life is complicated. If you really could expect full marks in "be a man of character" and "treat her right" categories -- if you were some mythical combination of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Jesus Christ, perhaps you could redeem a fairly self-centered wife. Those are, after all, men who made their names by succeeding at redeeming evil cultures with little more than compassion and force of character. But it'd sure be difficult and painful. I'm not claiming things would "work out" easily even in the best case, and that's the worst one. Most folks really can't expect straight A's there. Most folks, if they're honest with themselves, are shooting for more like a C+ and maybe don't even always get there. So in a way, how my model handles that corner case is academic. My point by assigning such a low value to who you choose isn't that it doesn't matter at all -- of course it does. Of course you can easily doom the whole thing to failure (short of heroic measures) by marrying an utterly irredeemable jerk. My point is that it's not a relatively big contributer. And I'm strongly of the opinion that it isn't. Stick to quality women, or even just decent women, and the other factors dominate. Over ten, fifteen, twenty years of marriage, the single largest factor in who your wife is, is who you are. And vice versa. Her criticisms become your defensive sore spots. Your generocity becomes her avid interest. Your callousness becomes her indifference. Her complacency becomes your disinterest. And on and on. After many years, every groove in your soul matches a cusp in hers, and vice versa. There's feedback. There's resonance. That's why the quality of your wife is 120% you. You grow to be like who you hang out with. You rise to high expectations or sink to low ones. Do you want your wife to be beautiful at 35? It doesn't matter whether she was a 6 or 10 or 8 at 24 when you married her. It matters whether you've been buying her jewelry, telling her her beauty is worth sacrifice and expense to you. It matters whether you've been telling her she's beautiful, encouraging her to experiment with new shoes, or making fun of her when you find her with green goop all over her face. It matters whether you criticize or support, because her outward appearance is a measure of her self-esteem, her confidence, and whether she thinks being pretty is a hobby worth keeping up with. Do you want a sexually engaged wife? Make sex something she loves. Be generous. Be romantic. Be attentive. And wait five years. Do you want a kind and generous wife? Be kind and generous. Do you want a wife who understands you? Talk to her. Do you want a wife who is not annoyed with you all the time? Listen to her criticism, don't defend yourself, change your behavior, explain in tenderest and most loving tones what has been misunderstood. To optimize your wife, optimize yourself. Because marriage is really long, and after just a few years, she's mostly who you've made her. (Goes the other way, too. But this place is mostly guys).
patrickgzill 17y ago
May I ask if you are actually married?
- lotharbot 17y ago
  Dove and I are married to each other.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    There should be some logic in HN to stop you two from down-voting each other for unrelated reasons. I would hate to see you lose 50 points for not taking the garbage out.
    - Dove 17y ago
      We post (and vote) from the same IP address a lot. On my honor, for independent reasons. But I think the code edits it out sometimes anyway. Oh well. I hate sock puppets as much as the next person, and my identity isn't that tied up in my HN karma score...
- Dove 17y ago
  To lotharbot. Almost eight years. He does this stuff right most of the time, and I'm a good wife most of the time. That's how I know what works.
rossover 17y ago
Math fail

Groxx 17y ago

Simple method for optimizing a marriage, as it works from both ends: Love does not merely happen, and merely continue. It takes work. Put effort into loving more and being more lovable (ie, self improvement), and your relationship will improve. I see too many long-married couples who are mostly together out of convenience / habit / apathy, and it really shows in their relationship and their lives in general. The ones I've found who are really happy have wonderful married lives because they both worked at it, and continue to do so, and this sample set includes a couple dozen 10-year-somethings through 50-year-somethings and a couple older yet. I've only been married for a few months, though we've been living together and effectively married for over two years, so go ahead and chock it up to n00b idealism. But why does that have to end? I've found plenty of cases where it never did, and every one of them has said it's because they worked to keep it going, and they're all vibrant, happy people.

pageman 17y ago

is this algorithm related to this? www.virginia.edu/economics/RePEc/vir/virpap/papers/virpap359.pdf

duck 17y ago

I think both optimizing and wife-selection are best left to another four letter word that isn't 'math', but rather love. I don't think love can be computed nor would it make sense to even try.